


As Long as You Make a Sound

by ThirdRateDuelist



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Amputation, Intrusive Thoughts, M/M, Pining, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, definately the weirdest thing ive ever written, no one actually gets amputated but im sure u can do the math with the other tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:08:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23319610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThirdRateDuelist/pseuds/ThirdRateDuelist
Summary: It's unbearable, the noise. Kaiba is well trained to not react.
Relationships: Jounouchi Katsuya | Joey Wheeler/Kaiba Seto
Comments: 6
Kudos: 73





	As Long as You Make a Sound

**Author's Note:**

> on the off chance u did not read the tags, i refer you to them now. dead dove don't eat. my friend who beta read this gave it the following response: "daaang this was. a lot."

It's unbearable, the noise. 

Kaiba is well trained to not react: to the chattering and squealing and squeaking of people, swarming, seeming as cells that divide and multiply; the blaring claxons of bells and car horns; the scraping howl of desks being dragged across floors. It's not just loud sounds. The faint, incessant chirrup of a bird outside, the bombarding melody of a mobile game, cause just as ear-splitting stab wounds through his skull. Worst of all is the creak of a step, any step, on a worn wooden floorboard. Kaiba can never stop the instinctual clench of teeth at that, the flick of his ears pulling back just a few millimeters to get away from the noise, and it's stupid enough that his auricular muscles can do that anyway. Humans shouldn't be able to flick their ears. It's a vestigial feature, remnants of a bygone age before humans became human. Animal and useless. Kaiba's ears flick constantly at the noises bombarding them in futile attempts to get away. 

Not all sounds are repulsive, with sharp, clawing nails that drill into his ear canals and scrape along the inner walls of his skull. Some are tolerable. The noise of traffic - as long as it keeps a constant pace - is one. Office phones, fingers clacking at keyboards, the flickering whir of a life point counter, are others. Some sounds are even enjoyable: the controlled howling of electronic music, the steady patter of a light rain, waves along a shore, smooth and steady. 

People's voices can fit into any category. Yuugi has a mild, calming tone. Pegasus's voice loops around Kaiba's brain with a constricting, razor sharp chord. Isono's has little in the way of distinctive quality, and he will never know how much that has influenced Kaiba's continual employment of him. Kaiba idly suspects Mokuba's voice would grate if it belonged to anyone but him. 

There is one voice that swims in and out of all three categories, alternately rippling and tearing across Kaiba's eardrums with abandon, and it belongs to Katsuya Jounouchi. 

Jounouchi's voice is, in a word, abrasive. Loud, scratching, unmannered, speech patterned with continual _eh_ s and _ah_ s and _huh_ s. There is an unnecessary questioning in his pronunciation, sentences often ending with an odd upward tilt. He speaks a great deal, often about nothing at all, meandering from vague topic to vague topic with his voice meandering with him, from background white noise to ear-splitting scraping to something approaching pleasant. 

His laugh is… abominable. 

As he sits down, Kaiba tries to ignore the discordant melody and concentrate instead on reading, but it and the chorus of the friendship troupe rings radiant and unavoidable through the classroom, as firm as the blocky rays of sunlight through the window that slam, heavy and sharply outlined, on Kaiba’s left side. The steady weight of summer heats both the exposed skin on his face and hands and under the armouring fabric of uniform, strictly buttoned, immaculate to the throat. Jounouchi's uniform is not immaculate. It'll be a cold day in a scientifically documented Hell when Jounouchi doesn't dress like the slob that he is, untucked and threadbare in the summer sun. 

It sounds like they're talking about some movie or other. Maybe a game. Action. Violent in a way that excites rather than horrifies. The hero gets a limb sliced off. 

"I don't get you, man," Honda is saying in a bewildered tone. His voice has the quality of being shrill without actually being high, and Kaiba doesn't know how he manages it. 

Jounouchi sounds about to explain himself, but Mazaki's voice slices across him, a precision instrument. "You hate the dark, are scared of mummies, but you think someone getting their arm chopped off is _hot_?" 

"Guys, guys," Jounouchi whines, and Kaiba knows if he stops not-reading the same sentence over and over and turns his head, he'll see the imbecile making pleading gestures in the air. "It's not about the arm getting chopped off, it's-" 

"This'll be interesting," Honda mutters. 

"Shut up," Jounouchi snaps. "It's… I dunno how to say it. It's intimate." 

After a moment of silence, Mazaki says, "Sometimes, Jou, you worry me. Dismemberment is _romantic_ now?"

"No, I think I get it… " Yuugi muses, clearly giving the concept a great deal of thought. "Like 'hand in marriage,' but literally. It _is_ a little romantic."

"Yeah! Like that! I just think it’s… _kinda_ hot. See, I'm not weird," Jounouchi says, relieved, and Kaiba allows himself the indulgence of turning his head just enough to see his form, sitting atop Yuugi's desk. 

"No, you're definitely weird," Yuugi says absentmindedly, shaking his head. When he's spluttered at, he hastily amends, "But in a way that I'm also weird, I guess." 

The group moves on to other, less bizarre conversation topics after that, and soon the day rotates away from Jounouchi's odd ramblings and into the droning of lecturing teachers and the ringing of bells. Kaiba stifles reactions to pens clicking and chairs rocking, some originating from Jounouchi because the boy can never sit _still_. Not like Kaiba. Legs folded tightly to keep them from juddering, Kaiba is a monument to immobility, except for his eyes, which even he cannot help but flicker from subject to subject. Naturally, they often land on Jounouchi - he is so frequently moving and therefore more interesting to watch than, say, a wall. 

This is not a new development. It's an indulgence Kaiba allows himself too often, to look at Jounouchi as he chews his way through gum, through pens and pencils, through the necklines of his shirts. As he runs his hand repeatedly through his bleach blonde hair, that could be so silky to the touch if he didn't overspray it, if Kaiba worked conditioner through the thin flaxen threads. 

Trying not to listen as Jounouchi chatters and splutters and snorts and mutters and _laughs_ through the rest of the day, Kaiba realises he understands exactly what Jounouchi meant, although he wouldn't give it such a mundane, pedestrian adjective as _hot_. To take someone's limb, to change someone's body in such a dramatic and irreversible way, would be a form of intimacy. Then there are the aspects that Jounouchi didn't touch - the physicality of the act, the imbalance of power, the imposition of control. Kaiba supposes that to a base creature like Jounouchi, that could all be considered _hot_. 

Jounouchi's voice racks claws across Kaiba's skin, across the side of his face and down his neck, and Kaiba's ears twitch in response. After he leaves school, after he leaves KaibaCorp afterwards, after he's seen that Mokuba has eaten dinner and has tucked him into bed for the night, Kaiba calmly takes a single plate, wraps it in a dish towel, and shatters it over his knee. 

Examining the remains, feeling the jagged edges against his fingers and the reverberation of the crunch in his ears, Kaiba reflects that there's an aspect of control to it. Even the most jarring of noises can become bearable, even wanted, if Kaiba knows he can stop it in an instant, get away when it becomes too much. The same song can have completely different effects if played on some layabout's boombox instead of through Kaiba’s own earphones, the roaring of a crowd in an arena as he stomps an opponent is bearable while the same howling for another event is not. 

Life continues, and Kaiba is bombarded with noise and light and movement, but it's the noise that he hates the most, that has him dig his nails into whatever part of his flesh is convenient, so no one gets the opportunity to wrinkle their nose at him clamping his hands over his ears. Such an action would be undignified, unbecoming, would cause tremors in the foundations of KaibaCorp, rumblings that their CEO is unstable and unfit for running the business. The first part is true, Kaiba supposes, but the second is not, and he has no plans to relinquish his titanium alloy grip on his company or his own thigh. Besides, it’s a manageable instability. Like everything else, Kaiba will deal with it by himself. 

Kaiba tries seeing a psychotherapist once, more for Mokuba's sake than his own, to prove that he is in fact capable of acting as his guardian. Caring for another person, one far less able to restrain their emotions, doesn’t leave room for having one’s own. It doesn't amount to much. Kaiba talks about the feelings the shrink wants him to talk about, the old childhood traumas and repeated kidnapping traumas, the shit that's rewarded with sympathetic nods and assurances that it's good that he feels angry, it's healthy, it's natural. Of course it's fucking natural, what does the idiot take him for? 

Before starting his sessions, Kaiba had steeled himself for a siege, a bombardment on the walls of cold wet stone. He quickly figures out he needn't have bothered, as he is told it's a good first step that he sought out professional help himself, recognising that he isn't an island. He thanks Gozaburo for the training that keeps him from laughing out loud at the statement and at the sickeningly assuring, patronising tone it's said in. Even professionals with certificate-tiled walls are susceptible to hearing what they want to hear, and as someone who schemed his way into becoming the CEO of a major corporation, Kaiba is adept at figuring out what it is people want to hear. The more isolated, more poisonous, more _unnatural_ waters of his conflicting thoughts remain his own, with nary a ripple on the surface. 

Ironic that Jounouchi, who holds no doctorates or offices with strategically placed couches, causes far more of a disturbance, kicking up swirls of dust from the seabed with his mere existence. Haranguing Kaiba into exchanging barbs, into duels, and into - after one tournament where their vocal match entertains the symphonic crowd for far longer than the allotted time - giving Jounouchi his number. 

As he watches Jounouchi that day and the following days, months, and what will be years, Kaiba idly thinks about cutting his arm off. 

Kaiba sets a unique chime to alert him when a message is from Jounouchi, and develops a Pavlovian jolt of the heart in response to the sound that flies through the air straight as an arrow. It infuriates him, that jolt, that another person could have such an affect on him. He responds by ignoring Jounouchi's messages for the most part. He has little to say to links to cat videos and random blog posts and fanart of Blue-Eyes White Dragon. 

The wheezing insects and laughter of summer rotate into the shifting leaves of autumn, followed by the crunching snow and whistling wind of winter, and Kaiba tries and fails not to hear Jounouchi's voice and the nervous tremor emerging in it. It's cold, and the school year is breaking into a sprint towards graduation. Everyone is quieter now and Kaiba wants to enjoy it, enjoy the peace, but the damn idiot is _influencing_ him. One morning, Jounouchi staggers in an hour late and considerably careworn, and Kaiba has to contend with a lump in his stomach. Another, Jounouchi is brighter, smiling with little crinkles at the edges of his deep brown eyes and Kaiba feels warmer despite the temperature drop and he hates that even more. He hates it even more than he hates the chime. He hates that this moron, this utter _bastard_ , affects his inner workings so easily and so totally, and all the fucker is doing is _exist._

 _It's not fair_ , Kaiba wants to scream. It's not fair that someone else should so utterly control the temperature of his body, the speed and strength of his heartbeat. Except control implies that Jounouchi is aware, that he is deliberate, and Kaiba doubts this is the case. 

Kaiba can't tell him. This is not a fact influenced by petty things such as wanting or not wanting. Kaiba imagines, even plans confessions, sketches them out in the inner walls of his skull as Jounouchi doodles on his own skin or roots around in his nose for nasal mucus to wipe off on the underside of his desk in an utterly disgusting habit. But when he opens his mouth, nothing ever happens. Whether this is a fortune or a curse, Kaiba never fully makes up his mind. 

What he hates most is the deep, heavy, unquestionable knowledge that Jounouchi is utterly unaffected. Jounouchi isn't immobile. He's as nauseatingly expressive as it's possible to be, and Kaiba doubts his capabilities at hiding anything. 

A pencil Jounouchi is fiddling with, an old thoroughly chewed thing, flies from his hand and lands at Kaiba's feet with a cacophonous clatter. Typical. The boy has seemingly no motor control at all, and Kaiba frequently finds such accidental missiles fired in his direction. He picks this one up from his feet, and wonders that _he_ has to be the one always sitting in the firing line. 

Jounouchi winces and leans over with the familiar vaguely abashed grin and bright, dark, brown eyes. "Whoops," he whispers through the quiet of the room as he always does, voice scraping over Kaiba's ears like sandpaper, or rough tongues. Jounouchi licks his lips. "Sorry 'bout that."

Kaiba stares at the palm proffered to him, at the lined, smudged skin, and thinks about how easy it should be to lean forward and lick the ink off, sink his teeth in. He glares and tucks the pencil into his own pocket, and at that, Jounouchi pouts and huffs and turns away. Kaiba muses on the oddities of irrational thinking, and how knowing a thought is completely and utterly deranged will by no means prevent it from occurring with great frequency. 

It would have to be the left arm. Kaiba would sever it at the elbow joint, sitting on Jounouchi's chest with a knee over his throat to keep him immobile, fingers entwined with Jounouchi's to hold his arm steady. Or maybe he'd grip tight around Jounouchi’s wrist, rubbing his thumb over the heel of his hand, feeling the steady slowing of the pulse in the limb even as Jounouchi's heart pumped faster. It would take some time to cut through the muscles and ligaments, but Kaiba would use the sharpest blade he could find to try and speed up the process as the crease of Jounouchi's elbow became deeper and wider and redder. No pain beyond the necessary. No anaesthetic either. There's little point if he can't feel it. Appreciate it. It's _his_ idea, after all.

Kaiba would bandage the stump afterwards. He doesn’t know what he’d do with the detached arm. Keeping it would be, he thinks with wry amusement, too morbid. Discarding it, profane. Burn it to embers maybe, to scatter across the lawns of Kaiba mansion. It could nourish his grass. 

When the school day is over and Kaiba sits at his desk in a brilliant silence, he retrieves the pencil from his pocket. Gnaw marks riddle its short, cracked surface, and Kaiba briefly thinks about setting his own teeth to the indentations. 

Snapping the pencil in half is harder than he thought it would be, perhaps because of its short length or Kaiba's own feeble strength, but he succeeds. It's not as satisfying as he hoped either; a dull splintering rather than a true, cracking, snapping break. The sound is a soft, miserable thing. There is no point keeping such a worthless, broken object, but Kaiba still stands over the trash longer than he should before failing to discard the shards. They instead find rest in his right pocket, from which Kaiba removes everything else. 

The next day, Jounouchi's abominable laugh blares through the air like a siren, like a solar flare, like something bright and alive and voliant, and Kaiba feels the skin of his palm break as he clenches around splintered shards of wood. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> you construct intricate rituals, etc etc
> 
> wanted to try something without much dialogue. u may have noticed kaiba doesn't speak at all
> 
> title is from the song of the same name by Sonoio


End file.
